File Download not Saving into Downloads Folder - php

Question

I wish to download files from my web server with download progress information. For that purpose, PHP cURL seems to be the best choice.
However, I have difficulties that the downloaded files are not placed into Downloads folder, where all the web files are normally downloaded. I use the following file download routine:
$fp = fopen(dirname(__FILE__) . 'uploaded.pdf', 'w+');
$url = "file:///D:/WEB/SAIFA/WWW/PickUpTest.pdf";
$ch = curl_init(str_replace(" ","%20", $url));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_BINARYTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_BUFFERSIZE, 1024*8);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOPROGRESS, false );
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROGRESSFUNCTION, 'progressCallback' );
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 0);
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_FILE, $fp );
curl_exec( $ch );
curl_close($ch);
fclose($fp);
unset($fp);
My problem is, that instead Downloads folder, the file is silently downloaded into my WWW folder, where the my PHP scripts including this cURL one reside. I get no File Download Save As dialog box neither.
To force Save As dialog box, I added the following header, at the beginning of the script:
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"uploaded.pdf\"");
$fp = fopen(dirname(__FILE__) . 'uploaded.pdf', 'w+');
...
After using the header, I get the Save As dialog box however, the file is still silently download into the folder with my PHP scripts. In the Downloads folder, a file 'uploaded.pdf' with filesize 0 is saved.
My question is, how to make PHP cURL to download files properly and place them into Downloads folder and offer Save As dialog box?
I use:
WAMP
Windows 7
PHP Version 5.4.12
Curl Version 7.29.0

Answer 1

By using the file functions you're actually asking your server to save the file so it makes sense that the results of the cURL call end up in your PHP folder.
What you really want, if I understand the problem, is to send the results of the cURL back to the browser. You're halfway there by sending the header(...) - which lets the user's browser know a file is coming and should be downloaded, the step you've missed is sending the cURL data with the header.
You could echo the contents of the file after you've saved it or, more efficiently (assuming you don't want an extra copy of the file), remove the code to save the file locally and remove the cURL option CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER. That will tell cURL to send the output directly so it will become the data for the download.
Hope that helps!
EDIT A simple example that grabs a local file (C:\test.pdf) and sends it to the user's browser (as uploaded.pdf).
<?php
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"uploaded.pdf\"");
// Get a FILE url to my test document
$url = 'file://c:/test.pdf';
$url= str_replace(" ","%20", $url);
$ch= curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_BINARYTRANSFER, true);
curl_exec( $ch );
curl_close ($ch);
Hope that helps a bit more!